A team composed of two iSchool PhD students, Ly Dinh and Jessica Cheng, and a PhD student from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Li-Min (Cassandra) Huang, won the ASIS&T 2018 Student Design Competition. The competition was held on November 13 during the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Adjunct Lecturer Ruth Shasteen (CAS '13) has received the 2018 Polestar Award from the Association of Illinois School Library Educators (AISLE) for her contributions to school librarianship. Shasteen served as district librarian at Neoga CUSD and high school librarian at Central A&M High School in Moweaqua, both in the state of Illinois. In addition to being a school librarian, she also taught for many years in Illinois classrooms at Sullivan Jr. High School, Sullivan High School, and Bethany Jr-Sr. High School. 

Doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra won the Best Student Paper Award at the Workshop on Informetric and Scientometric Research (SIG/MET), which was held on November 10 in conjunction with the ASIS&T 2018 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada. Sponsored by Elsevier, the award recognizes achievement in student presentation in the following criteria: design of the study, originality, relevance to the workshop, and adherence to research ethics. 

The Iowa Library Association (ILA) has received the 2018 Downs Intellectual Freedom Award for taking a leadership role in several highly visible challenges to intellectual freedom. The award is given annually by the faculty of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and cosponsored by Libraries Unlimited.

Associate Professor Emily Knox has been selected to receive a Community Impact Award from the Junior League of Champaign-Urbana for her work with Makerspace Urbana. She will receive the award at the Junior League's Community Impact Gala on November 17.

MS/IM student Suyash Singh received Honorable Mention in the Data Visualization Competition sponsored by the University of Illinois Library’s Scholarly Commons. The competition provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in visually communicating information. Winners were announced on October 9 at the Fall 2018 Scholarly Commons Open House.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has been appointed as a 2018-19 R.C. Evans Data Analytics Fellow in the University of Illinois-Deloitte Foundation Center for Business Analytics. Launched in 2016, the Center is part of the Gies College of Business at the Urbana campus.

Three iSchool students were on the winning team at PygHack 2018, a 24-hour hackathon that brings together coders, designers, engineers, and dreamers to work together to create something that can benefit the community or an organization in Champaign-Urbana. This year's event was held on September 29-30 at the University of Illinois Research Park. PygHack projects were judged on community benefit, collaboration, design, functioning prototype, and innovation. 

Assistant Professor Masooda Bashir has been named the iSchool's Centennial Scholar for 2018-2019. Endowed by alumni and friends of the School, the Centennial Scholar award recognizes outstanding accomplishments and/or professional promise in the field of library and information science.

Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes (MS '16) has received a NumFOCUS Contributor Award for her contributions to Project Jupyter, a nonprofit, open-source project that supports interactive data science and scientific computing across all programming languages.

Eight iSchool alumni were selected to participate in the Minnesota Institute for Early Career Librarians from Traditionally Underrepresented Groups, which was held from July 16-20 in Minneapolis. The institute is a week-long program housed at and sponsored by the University of Minnesota Libraries, focusing on the development of library leaders from diverse backgrounds.

Nineteen iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2018. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.

Alison C. Rollins (MS '17) has been selected to receive a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, which is given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.

The iSchool Alumni Association (ISAA) honored its 2018 award recipients at the ISAA Annual Meeting and reception, which was held on June 24 during the annual meeting of the American Library Association in New Orleans.

Lynne M. Thomas (MS '99), head of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library and an iSchool adjunct professor, has won two Hugo Awards—science fiction's most prestigious award. Thomas, now a seven-time Hugo Award winner, joined the University Library in July 2017.

iSchool alumna Sarah T. Roberts (PhD '14) will receive a 2018 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for her groundbreaking content moderation research. Awarded every year since 1992, EFF's Pioneer Awards recognize the leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier.

Two iSchool master's students have been selected by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Committee on Diversity and Leadership to participate in the Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce (IRDW) as ARL Diversity Scholars.

Two iSchool alumni, Jennifer Bueche (MS '94) and Lucas McKeever (MS '13), have been selected to receive awards from the Illinois Library Association (ILA).

Recent graduate Wendy Hoi Yan Wong (MS '18) has been awarded a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). The fellowship program offers scholars the chance to develop new research models, collaborate with information specialists, and explore new career opportunities. In addition to her MS/LIS degree from Illinois, Wong holds a PhD in music from CUHK.

Assistant Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has been named a 2018-2019 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."